Point of Law (2 page)

“By the way, Dad, I tied in. I’m off belay.”

He nods. “Waiting for you to say it, son. Belay off.” Finally he releases his grip. I’m annoyed and embarrassed. I’ve violated one of his cardinal rules by failing to announce my status, but at least he’s too preoccupied to comment further.

“Do you have a strategy for dealing with your brother when or if he shows up?” he asks.

I take a deep breath. This is something I’ve been thinking about for weeks, ever since my suspension and the news about the pending development of Wild Fire Valley as a part of a Forest Service land swap. I’d convinced my father to fly in from the Pentagon to meet Roberto and me for a last climb here together—and an attempt to save my brother’s life. Despite a lot of mental effort, I’m still uncertain what our plan should be. A hard-core user like Roberto needs confinement and careful medication, something he’s not likely to submit to voluntarily. One thing I know for sure is that my father’s unconcealed animosity, born out of the impending termination of his career, won’t help things. Nor will my own distaste for the hard drugs I’ve devoted my professional life to combating. Persuading Roberto to swerve away from the path of self-destruction he’s speeding down won’t be easy, and there’s no place in any strategy for anger and recrimination.

Climbing has always been the Burns family’s first drug of choice.
La llamada del salvaje,
as my mother describes it. The call of the wild. According to her it’s a sort of genetic flaw on my father’s side that has descended to Roberto and me. It’s a hunger we learned to feed by getting lethal amounts of air beneath our heels. The fear you feel free-climbing, hundreds or thousands of feet off the deck, and with just a skinny rope as backup, is like an illicit substance—once ingested it makes the sweet stuff called noradrenaline just ooze out from the adrenal glands. It blows through all the panic that comes from deadly heights, replacing it with a tingly sensation. Ecstasy. Exaltation. Rapture. The negative side effect is that it’s a little harder to replicate that feeling after each session. You have to push it a little further. Dad and I have learned to control our addiction—we’ve learned that there’s pleasure in just crawling up into the heights without needing to lay it all on the line for that hormonal surge. Roberto hasn’t.

He reached for something even stronger. Starting in his early twenties he turned to pharmaceuticals to pump up the volume. He began with pot, mushrooms, and acid, then moved on to methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin. He was chasing the dragon, looking for a better and louder amp. On the frequent climbing trips we used to take together in my college days, he would sometimes offer me some. I’d never been interested. Even then, before having really seen the damage those drugs could do, I preferred a natural high, although I had occasionally smoked marijuana with him in my teenage years (something I still consider no more dangerous than beer). Roberto once told me he’d discovered that cocaine mixed with heroin—a speedball—could push him beyond climbing’s natural rush. It could take him places far further than the thrill of fighting ordinary gravity.

“It’s just an ice cream habit,” he’d explained when I’d given him a hard time about the hard drugs. “I got it under control, bro.”

Right.

But it isn’t just the drugs, although they’ve become the center of Roberto’s life. It’s the way he interacts with people, the way he thinks, even the way he climbs. Roberto has become addicted to living on the very edge. If he isn’t climbing, he’s slamming a needle deep into a vein. If he isn’t surrounded by the circle of fast-living friends who worship him as the fastest of them all, then he’s brawling with anyone he perceives as having done something unjust. And if he isn’t utterly free, then he’s caged in a county jail somewhere. Recently there had even been a brief stint in a federal prison. Roberto has happily danced so far out on the edge and for so long that it’s a miracle the void hasn’t yet sucked him in.

Do I really believe we can change that? It would require almost a repolarization of my brother’s soul. I know, even now, that this is simply a last hurrah before the odds catch up with him. There’s no chance in hell he’ll ever become an ordinary citizen, responsible with his life and his future, and constrained by the rules that civilization demands.

So I say to my father, “No strategy, Dad. Just show him that we love him, that if he keeps this up we’ll be the ones who suffer.”

My father shakes his head and uncharacteristically expresses some emotion in his voice while looking at the red and gold stone of the canyon’s opposite wall. “Shit, Anton, it’d be hard to suffer much more. It’d be a relief if he were dead.”

You’d think a son would be shocked to hear his father talk about his brother like that. But I’m not. In my darkest moments I often think the same thing. I’m tired of waiting for the telephone to ring late in the night; waiting for the quiet voice of some Colorado police officer to tell me that my brother’s dead.

There isn’t much more to say than that.

I close my eyes and recall a scene from this morning, just a few hours ago, when my father and I sped on the highway out of the seemingly endless suburbs of Tomichi in the predawn blackness, on our way to the valley. I’d been glancing over at my father’s deeply lined face while we talked, noticing how old it looked in the glow of the dashboard’s lights. His mouth opened suddenly. His eyes narrowed. I snapped my own eyes forward to the road. A big coyote was braced facing us in the middle of the lane. His eyes burned with green fire in the reflected heat of the headlights. The silver-tipped ruff of fur around his neck and shoulders was standing straight up. I swung the wheel hard to the left, onto the wrong side of the road, mashing the brake and throwing my big dog in the backseat across the truck. The coyote never even flinched.

That coyote was just like Roberto. Totally defiant in the face of law and civilization, even when it’s coming at him seventy miles per hour in the form of three thousand pounds of rusty Japanese steel. Utterly audacious, reckless, and not long for this world. But beautiful all the same.

I realize that my brother’s luck must soon run out, that the world won’t swerve away much longer. And that Roberto’s nuclear-powered élan combined with whatever sort of shit he likes to spike in his veins will vastly magnify the force of the inevitable collision. What I don’t yet realize is just how many lives are about to be lost in the crash.

Opening my eyes to the blue sky, I take up the sling of gear my father has laid between us. Without a word I add the pieces from the anchor I’d pulled below and slip it clanking over my head and one shoulder. Standing, I arch my neck upward and try to plot the course that will take me another rope length into the sky. My skin touches the warm, rough rock as I slide my fingers over the lip of a small contour above my head. The familiar texture of it for the first time in my life fails to give me a small thrill. For a moment I’m caught off balance, experiencing a sense of vertigo and dread I’ve never experienced before. This is a mistake, I tell myself, as I will the web of well-conditioned muscles in my forearms to grip with my fingers and hold me on the ledge. Something bad is going to happen. A cold sweat seeps out of my skin. I glance at my father and see him looking back curiously. Concerned.

“Locked and loaded?” I ask, trying to reassure myself with the start of the short litany he’d drilled into Roberto and me as children. We examine the harness buckles and knots at each other’s waists.

“Tight and right,” Dad responds, his voice puzzled.

“On belay?”

“Belay on.”

“Climbing.”

TWO

I
T TAKES MORE
than an hour to rappel down the cliff’s four pitches. Oso’s yellow eyes track me all the way. But the beast doesn’t come out from the shade of the cottonwoods until my feet are on the stony canyon floor. There I pop the ropes out of the ATC and yell up to my father, who’s waiting on a ledge halfway down, that I’m off rappel. Oso finally lumbers to his feet, shakes some brambles from his woolly black coat, and approaches me with his head held low. His stump of a tail quivers in the air, not really swinging at all, when he bumps my hip with his broad snout. Over the rushing of the stream just a few feet away, I hear a low rumble from the dog’s chest. It’s his version of a purr. I rub Oso’s ears while watching my father slide down the last two pitches with the controlled grace of a spider.

When Dad touches the ground, he too holds out a hand to scratch the beast’s massive head. Oso lifts his lips with a more audible growl and my father jerks back his hand.

“Damn it, dog, I’m just trying to make friends,” my father growls in response.

“He’ll come around,” I tell him. “He’s got to get to know you.” Then, after a moment’s thought, I add, “Actually, you may be better off trying to be someone else.” I can’t picture Oso warming up to my father in his current mood.

Dad makes a mirthless noise like “Uh-huh” and turns away.

I’ve already explained to him how it had taken a long, long time for the dog to even let me touch him. And I’d shown my father the parallel scars on one forearm from when I’d tried to take the liberty too soon. Eight weeks and eighteen stitches. It took that long to tame Oso’s savage heart enough for me to stroke him.

I’d found Oso nine months before. He was chained to the back porch of a decrepit house outside Rawlins that was being used as a clandestine methamphetamine lab. The shaggy beast was supposed to scare away both cops and rival dealers. During my undercover investigation of the meth lab’s operators, I’d heard one of the suspects claim to have fed the dog a missing informant. Although I doubted it was really true, he’d certainly looked the part—a hundred and fifty pounds or so of unidentifiable breeding, malnourished muscle, open sores blowing with flies, and those enormous white teeth. He had the appearance and the demeanor of a starved grizzly bear.

One hot afternoon, with the help of some deputies from the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office, I took down the lab and arrested its operators. At one point in the short fight, the monster on the back porch had to be pepper-sprayed when a deputy chased a suspect out through the rear door. Oso was lucky not to have been shot right then.

Later on, after the arrests, the interviews, the paperwork, and the dismantling of the lab, I returned as the local officers managed to get him into a cage provided by the state’s Wildlife Control agency. They’d wrestled him in by using wire nooses on the ends of long metal poles. One of them was jabbing at him with a sharp-bladed shovel, seeing just how crazy he could make him before they carted him away. Blood from the beast’s lips and teeth ran down the cage’s steel bars as he tried to crunch through to get at his captors. Something about the plight of the tormented beast made me lose it. I knocked down the deputy with the shovel—I kicked his legs out from under him and punched him in the ribs as he fell. It took the three other officers to keep me from doing worse. Like jabbing
him
with the shovel, to see how he liked it.

Despite the resulting and now-deferred charges for assault on a peace officer, I adopted the monster as my own. In some subconscious way, Oso reminded me of my brother.

After weeks of giving love and receiving only the occasional slashing wound (for which I was lucky—his jaws have the power to snap bones), I finally convinced Oso that his days of abuse were over. Now he is cautiously devoted to me, yet reluctant to accept another’s touch and still, at times, even a little uncertain about mine.

Because of his size and disposition, Oso continues to be an immense pain in my ass. In addition to the eighteen stitches, he’s torn apart three different rental homes when I left him alone for too long. He got me evicted from each of them. I’ve learned that I need to take the beast with me pretty much wherever I go. Even when I’m working, Oso is happiest to remain hunched massively in the passenger seat of my ancient Land Cruiser, his weight causing it to tilt to one side, where he can glare out the windshield and watch for his only friend.

“Is that stinking pile of teeth and fur worth it?” Dad had asked yesterday after I’d picked him up at the Denver airport. He’d been visibly tense on the long ride down to Tomichi with the beast lurking in the backseat, just inches behind his exposed neck.

“Yeah, he is,” I answered, smiling. It’s a rare thing to see my father nervous.

When Oso wanders away to slurp at the river, I begin stuffing gear in the packs. My father pulls the ropes and then coils them. I notice that every few turns he stops and looks around, gazing up and down the canyon walls, probably reminiscing to himself about the summers he’d spent here three decades ago. I pull a small tube of sunscreen out my pack and hold it out to him.

“Want some? Your head’s starting to look like a ripe tomato.”

“That’s funny, son. You’ll see how funny in a few years.”

“Not me, Dad. I’ve got Mom’s hairy Latin genes.”

I smear some of the lotion onto my fingertips and rub it on my face. Touching the left side of my face, I feel the unnaturally smooth strip of skin that runs from my eye almost all the way down to my upper lip. It’s from where a falling flake of jagged rock the size of a dinner plate had split my face a few years earlier. I massage in the lotion with care—at one time I’d hoped to prevent the scar from baking into something permanently disfiguring. It’s a habit I’ve clung to ever since the accident. Maybe someday the scar will disappear. Between climbing and the dog, soon I’ll be nothing but scar tissue.

I take off my sunglasses and stare at my distorted reflection in the mirrored lenses. What I see isn’t pleasant. I look like some sort of desperate fugitive, with my close-cropped hair and the short beard I’d allowed since my suspension began. The beard is an experiment with trying to hide at least a portion of the wound. But it just makes things worse. I quickly put the glasses back on.

Dad is again staring up the canyon to where it opens into a wide valley, and where beyond that there’s a broad mountainside containing valleys, forests, and streams of its own. It is the twelve-thousand-foot mountain that’s soon due to become a ski resort.

“Feel like home?” I ask my father, thinking about how he’d spent every summer of his late teens and early twenties camping on this land.

Dad shakes his head. His mouth is turned down at a tight angle. “Nope. Not anymore.” When he turns back around to continue up-canyon, his shoulders, still bulging with muscle beneath his olive T-shirt, sag a little to match his frown.

I imagine this place in a few years’ time: the forests bulldozed to make ski runs, the ridges lined with chairlifts, the valley sprawling down-canyon with condos, asphalt, traffic lights, restaurants, and liquor stores. Already a lodge is being built halfway up on the mountainside. I can hear the distant whir of an electric saw and the faint, erratic pulse of hammers. Olympus is dying.

Both of us are quiet as we leave the canyon and enter the broader valley. Ahead of us, directly to the north, is a small, densely wooded hillside with a red cliff in its center shaped like a heart. The cliff is only a couple hundred feet high and is composed of crumbly sandstone, unsuitable for serious climbing. At its base lies a steep field of broken boulders that had, over the centuries, spilled from the cliff’s face like drops of blood. Two small figures, barely visible, are rappelling down it. I wonder why anyone would bother when there’s such fantastic granite in the canyon. People do strange things, like tearing up a place like this.

To our right is the 12,500-foot massif of Wild Fire Peak. Its westward face is a complex series of low-angled glades, forests, and ravines. About halfway up is the source of the distant construction noise we hear—a crew is hard at work building what’s to be the mid-mountain ski lodge. I can see a winding path of torn-out aspens and pines leading up to it.

A short way to our left is the end of the Forest Service road, the only way into this place. The road terminates in the broad meadow where we’re camped. The construction trucks have torn a new series of paths through the valley that don’t come together until they begin their winding climb up the mountainside.

“Stay close, Oso,” I call before we come out of the screen of trees and into the valley. I don’t want him to scare the other campers in the meadow. Due to his size and cut-down tail, more than one nearsighted person has mistaken him for a shambling bear. As we walk through the pines toward where I’d left my Land Cruiser, my jaw is tight with tension and my teeth feel sore.

Will Roberto be waiting for us?
The question is crawling around in my mouth but I don’t interrupt my father’s thoughts to let it out. Like an unpleasant chore, his arrival is something I’d be happy to put off for a little while longer.

When we’d come through the meadow earlier in the morning, before the sun had risen, there were only a few other cars parked near quiet campsites. Now, at midday, there are more like thirty. And the meadow is full of activity. The articles I’d read about the coming land swap mentioned that some of the local environmental activists intended to hold a protest vigil in the valley this week. It looks like the vigil has begun.

Near the meadow’s center a group of seven or eight youths are standing in a circle and kicking a small, brightly woven sack the size of a lemon back and forth with their feet. They’re either college-aged or in the wandering postgraduate years. Dirty white tape clings to some of the kids’ fingers, marking them as climbers. A few mountain bikes have been tossed haphazardly in the grass nearby.

Around the fringe of the meadow, where it’s bordered by thick stands of spruce and aspens, are the other campsites. There’s more than one rusting VW bus among the battered cars that stand in the grass near tents patched with duct tape and smoke-blackened fire rings. More young people gather around some of those, and the sweet scent of marijuana from shared joints wafts in the meadow’s gentle breeze. Music plays from a boom box—Phish, I think. I see a few backpacks with chalk bags and climbing slippers clipped to gear loops with shiny carabiners. A few older women, even fewer older men, are seated in lawn chairs next to the motor homes they’ve somehow managed to bounce up the rough road. Through the trees comes the occasional shout of laughter from the hot springs by the creek.

The entire scene has a sad festival air. A sort of wake. Soon the entire valley will be torn down and replaced with bright condos and neat landscaping.

There’s no sign of Roberto. Things won’t be so peaceful when he gets here. His frenetic energy is like a tornado. It never fails to stir things up, to throw shit all over the place.

We dump our packs beside the truck. I check the locked glove box, where my badge, gun, and cell phone are stored, and find everything still there. From a cooler in back I get out a couple of jars and a loaf of bread and start smearing together peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while my dad mixes powdered Kool-Aid into two water bottles. Oso rolls in the tall grass nearby. He’s grunting with pleasure and bicycling his hind legs.

I look up when I feel more than hear his deep growl vibrating over the beat of the boom box, which is now playing Blind Melon. Two women are walking toward us. One is blonde and young, college-aged, with a pretty face. I can’t help but admire the expanse of smooth, pale skin that extends below her brief shorts down to her bare feet. Her hair is a rat’s nest of dreadlocks and tight beaded braids. On her upper half she wears only a purple tank top that is cut to reveal a flat stomach. Braless. She has an unconscious spring in her step, as if she’s delighted to be here, half-naked in the meadow.

The other woman is smaller, older, and darker but even more striking. She radiates intensity. My eyes are drawn to her despite the lush blonde’s obvious appeal. She’s thin, almost to the point of being gaunt, with lean muscles carving down from her shoulders to her wrists. I guess her age at middle thirties, and that’s only because of her clothes, her confident manner, and unlike the other youths in the meadow, her face is unpierced. She wears a white sleeveless shirt that she’s buttoned almost to her neck with old jeans and a pair of worn-out running shoes. Her face is all angles. High, sharp cheekbones, a long jaw, and a slightly oversized nose. The most striking thing about her is that despite the dark hair that spills over half her face, a black cord is visible where it stretches across an exposed part of her forehead. Beneath it there’s the oblong shape of an eye patch.

“That dog’s not going to bite, is it?” she asks as they approach our camp. She looks from the beast to us warily. Our appearance, mine in particular with my damaged face, probably doesn’t inspire much confidence.

“Oso!” I call to him. “Cut it out. Get over here.” I click my tongue against the roof of my mouth, and Oso sullenly turns, coming to sit at my side. “He’s harmless, really,” I say to the women.

My father chuckles from behind me, not at all persuaded. It’s the first real bit of mirth I’ve heard from him all day.

“We saw you guys come in this morning. My name is Kim Walsh,” the one-eyed woman tells us.

“I’m Sunny,” the blonde girl says, smiling down at the dog and displaying perfect white teeth. The name is totally appropriate for her.

I introduce us as “Antonio and Leonard Burns,” leaving out our respective titles of Special Agent and Colonel, then ask if they want some Kool-Aid.

Kim shakes her head but Sunny says, “Sure!” and takes my father’s bottle from him.

I have a hard time taking my eyes off Kim’s face. It isn’t the eye patch but something else, some sort of feeling in my gut that I’m destined to know her better. That sort of feeling has happened several times before, like when I’d seen a particularly beautiful girl in class the first day of school and
knew
she’d become my girlfriend. It has always proven true. The thing that surprises me about it now is that this woman seems to be almost a decade older than me, probably a more appropriate age for my father than me. I’ve never felt much heat for an older woman before. Yet I suppress an urge to self-consciously run my hand over the scar on my face.